Greg Fazekas
2019’s word of the year: multicloud (connectivity)
How do you maintain multiple networks on multiple cloud platforms, each with their own means and methods of running their cloud environment?
Feb 22nd, 2019
It’s a multicloud world. (We’re just managing it.)
Whether you want to spell it multi cloud (with a space), multi-cloud (with a dash), or just ditch all of that and go full-on conjoined “multicloud”, the fact remains that multicloud utilization is on every business leader’s lips.
Whereas before enterprises viewed migration to the cloud as a distant possibility, the focus has now shifted entirely. Increasingly data intensive applications and services require that they speed up their digital transformation, and to stay competitive, explore the benefits of migrating their data, services and applications not only into one cloud, but many clouds.
Competing cloud infrastructure offerings, such as AWS and Azure, provide enterprises with undeniable benefits. Network availability, for instance, can more readily be optimized as workloads can be switched between vendors in the event of a localized failure. At the same time, utilizing one, or many clouds, also presents new challenges to network management.
How do you maintain multiple networks on multiple cloud platforms, each with their own means and methods of running their cloud environment?
In comes multicloud connectivity.
Multicloud connectivity is the software-defined, invisible layer of abstraction that takes care of communication between different (and often incompatible) vendors, platforms, and implementations (on-prem, hybrid, private, or public).
As digital transformation journeys are becoming more and more streamlined and less and less experimental, it helps network managers to consider the emerging best practices around multicloud connectivity.
Multicloud ways and woes: playing nice with each other
Organizations can and should take charge of picking services aligned with their cost-benefit vectors. From SaaS applications like Salesforce, Office 365, or Google Drive, to raw computing and storage infrastructure resources, most everything is delivered from the cloud. But that also means more moving parts, which can lead to possible service degradation.
Best practice: Cloud vendors aren’t motivated to play nice with each other, so it falls to organizations to plan for and implement multicloud connectivity in their cloud adoption strategy.
Multicloud ways and woes: security
In the charge to the cloud, there has been a huge focus on security for storage and computing resources. However, there hasn’t been a similar awareness of network vulnerabilities - and with multicloud re-defining networking it’s especially timely to pay attention to security now.
Best practice: Beyond smart planning of networking strategies, multicloud connectivity helps to address the challenges posed by threats to network availability.
Multicloud ways and woes: disaster recovery
When disaster strikes,, cloud services are well-positioned to keep a business up and running regardless. DDoS attacks or simple human error disrupting everyday operations don’t need to cause a total shutdown of an organization’s network. Building contingencies seem simpler in the multicloud, but disaster recovery can also put an increased strain on the network, particularly if network managers have to struggle with vastly differing operational requirements in different cloud environments.
Best practice: With such a critical role to play, networks need to rely on strong, functional connectivity between multiple cloud environments to strengthen them.
Multicloud connectivity and the Men&Mice Suite
Multicloud makes connectivity not only crucial but defining. As a company focused on networking solutions, Men&Mice is excited about this unique emphasis on networking itself.
The Men&Mice Suite is a hybrid and multicloud DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management solution. It’s been built to provide the multicloud connectivity by being widely compatible, secure, and reliable.
It’s software-defined. The connectivity layer provided by the Men&Mice Suite depends on no set architecture or infrastructure and requires no single-point-of-failure hardware.
It’s compatible. API-driven and backend-agnostic, the Men&Mice Suite simplifies programmatic control and automation across multiple cloud vendors.
It’s secure. The Men&Mice Suite extends the enterprise-grade security over the connectivity layer, allowing for audit trails, role-based access controls, and migrating existing security policies to the cloud.
It’s fault-tolerant. Customers can rest easier as the fall-out from human error, DDoS attacks and cloud service outages can easily be mitigated by the Men&Mice xDNS Redundancy™ feature.
With the upcoming release of version 9.2, the Men&Mice Suite improves on its already best-in-class solution. From deep AWS and Azure integration to the flexible web application, developing the Men&Mice xDNS Redundancy™ for added security and reliability, we’ve made multicloud DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management even better and ready to deliver on the need for connectivity.
